Phone scams are increasingly common and may cause significant financial cost and emotional distress to its victims. Phone scams may be initiated by scam perpetrators by phone calls and/or voice messages. A victim of a phone scam may often be tricked into providing money, private information, and/or access to the victim's phone to a perpetrator of the phone scam. Hundreds of millions of dollars in total financial losses are attributable to phone scams and the losses are predicted to increase. Phone scams may affect any potential victim with a phone. The perpetrators are often in a different countries and tracking/prosecution of the perpetrators may be difficult.
Phone scams may be difficult to prevent. Existing methods for scam prevention typically involve filtering phone numbers of incoming phone calls based on a database of phone numbers designated as suspicious (e.g., blacklisted). Existing methods may compare a phone number of an incoming phone call against phone numbers that are blacklisted and block the phone call if the phone number matches a blacklisted phone number. Existing methods may not detect scammers that evade detection by spoofing phone numbers, frequently changing spoofed phone numbers, and using spoofed phone numbers that correspond to a geographical area of a targeted victim (e.g., the area code of a spoofed phone number matches the area code of a targeted victim so the targeted victim believes the call is local). Phone scams also cause significant costs for telecommunication carriers that carry the scam voice traffic on their networks and to security companies which provide security services and products to the scam victims.